Archive for the ‘Disgusting’ Category

Saturday Review: Planters Smoky Bacon Peanuts

Saturday, January 16th, 2010

Any time I see that a new food or beverage has come out on the market, I must try it. After all, variety is the spice of life. The stranger the better, I say. I’ve demonstrated in the past that I’ll eat pretty much anything at least once.

However, since I’ve eliminated sugar and high-fructose corn syrup from my diet (no more Stewart’s Key Lime Soda :sadface:), I’ve had a hard time finding interesting food products to taste test.  Still, though, I scour the gas stations and discount grocery aisles in hopes that I’ll get my hands on something really interesting, really taste-bud exploding, possibly insanity-inducing, something really fucking weird but free from corn syrup. A week ago, while questing for dill pickle-flavored sunflower seeds, I came across this beautiful package.

What the heck is wrong with my phone's camera?

Yes, Internet, those are artificially-flavored bacon peanuts. One can only assume that Planters has a fat mad scientist on the payroll now. The package alone won me over: the iconic wealthy legume character, the porcine silhouette, and the correct (according to Merriam-Webster and Google Chrome’s automatic spell-checker) spelling of the word “smoky”, all weave together to create a heady spell over me. Also, they were cheap.

For a proper review, I believe that a product (whatever it may be) must be consumed in a setting that the creator will have foreseen. Hot-dogs should be consumed on street corners preferably near a urinating hobo, opium in a suitably seedy den full of surly ex-patriots, coca leaves while hiking the trails of Peru, and salty snack foods while in as severely a reclined position as humanly possible. Laying in a recliner in a track suit is good. Laying on a bed, on your back, with your head hanging over the edge of the bed while watching television upside-down, naked, is ideal.

The Set-Up

For this particular review, the environment I chose was: reclining in my computer chair with my feet on a lovely antique desk the previous tenant left here, watching the second season of “Arrested Development” on Hulu.com, taking swigs from a Diet Coke. Don’t worry about my feet on the antique desk; I also work on computers systems and do some light soldering (musical equipment, mostly) on the desk and it’s long-since been scratched beyond repair or hope. My black leather computer chair is, I think, the most comfortable chair in the house and “Arrested Development” is a television show that, well… it’s one of the best, wittiest, comedy shows ever made. If you’ve never seen it, we can still be friends and everything, but there’ll be some tension.

Expectations

Well, I’ve operated most of my life on the assumption that BACON = WIN, so my expectations are pretty effing high. The best I can hope for here is that the taste will not be unlike a bacon and peanut-butter sandwich. I’ve never actually had a bacon and peanut-butter sandwich, but doesn’t it sound great? I mean, come on! It sounds incredible! The worst that can happen here is that I throw out the peanuts and go try to make myself a PB&B.

Again, my camera is broken. Sorry.

My biggest fear for these peanuts is that they’ll taste like a band-aid smells or that they’ll taste like burning. I’m only somewhat expecting this because (a) off-brand Bacon-Bits taste a little like burning to me and (b) many of the reviews of bacon-flavored things done at AVClub.com mention the burning/band-aid taste.

It should also be noted that (as far as I can tell from a cursory glance at the ingredients) this product contains NO BACON. Yes, despite the visible pig silhouette, and in clear violation of the laws of bacon, they’re kosher. Or halal. And vegetarian. Scary, but it’s a risk I’m wiling to take for a potential peanut game-changer.

The Taste

Like any good peanut, it’s all salt on the front-end. Not too salty, though. Not as salty as dry-roasted peanuts. After that, we have the crunch: standard peanut-y crunch. Nothing special so far, but that’s fine. I’m expecting something big to come from behind. (That’s what she said.)

Following the crunch, there is a blast of smoky bacon flavor that doesn’t burn exactly, but isn’t subtle. If the flavor scale starts with zero (rice) and goes to ten (Nacho Cheesier Doritos) then the bacon peanuts are a pretty firm eight.

(By the way, my flavor rating scale is measure in units of “Tastetacularness”. Not to be confused with my seldom-used scrotum-similarity rating scale, which is done in units of “Testicularness”. More on that… never.)

I’m disappointed (with the peanuts, not the scrotum scale). There’s not much bacon flavor, really, just salt, a bunch of liquid smoke, and that greasy umami taste that comes from a whole metric ass-load of MSG. If there were bacon-flavored Ramen noodles, this is what the flavoring packet would taste like.

Looking at the back of the package more carefuly, I see that there isn’t actually MSG in here, but there is (surprisingly) corn syrup. WTF. Really? In my peanuts, HFC-invested shadow government? Effing crap. Nothing is sacred.

The Verdict

Let me break it down like a fraction for you, Internet:

BACON = WIN (btw, Thick-Cut Applewood-Smoked Bacon = WINSEX)

FAKE BACON < BACON

FAKE BACON ≠ WIN

FAKE BACON = FAIL

FAIL + COPIOUS SMOKE FLAVORING + EFFING CORN SYRUP × PEANUTS = FAILHELLA LAME

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT = STILL WIN

That about sums it up. Tootle, pip.

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The Cold, Wet, and Naked Truth.

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

“I woke up, last night, cold, wet and naked.” Speedicut told me.

“You don’t say.” I remarked, taking a sip of my tea. Some people might be shocked by a comment like this, but not me. Certainly not coming from Speedicut.

“I do say. I fell asleep in my bathtub again,” he continued. “I just get so comfortable that I drift off. And then I wake up hours later, after the water has become freezing cold, though most of it has drained away. It’s a jarring experience.”

I am under the impression that Speedy tells me these things because he knows how my mind works, and he knows now that the image of him, shivering, wet and nude, is in my brain. This pleases him on some level, I think.

“Why don’t you set an alarm clock to get you out of the tub, you know, before you fall asleep?” I suggest.

“Where would I set it? On the edge of the tub? That’s suicidal!”

It occurs to me later that falling asleep in a bathtub is pretty suicidal in itself. And, plus, there’s a plethora of flat surfaces in a bathroom to put an alarm clock. But of course, these sorts of poignant thoughts always come too late. Witty retorts never quite reach the tongue in time, and when they do, I know that I can’t help but be smug about it.

“Huh. That bridge has a sign up there that says ‘No Equestrians’,” my drummer once said to me while we were riding along to a gig.

“Luckily, I’m an Aries.” I said back. Oh yeah, that’s comedy. My drummer sighed.

It happens more often when arguing that you don’t know what to say next, the perfect cutting remark just doesn’t enter your brain. Which is probably a good thing. Imagine if, in the heat of the moment, you could have said all of the things that you thought of later. It would be horrible. No one would ever talk with each other again, I think. There would be a lot more crying.

Perhaps our brains intentionally prevent us from coming up with more hurtful things to say, to save us from ourselves. While it may have been technically savvy to bring up my wife’s mother in a particular argument with my wife, I didn’t because I didn’t think of it until the next day. And good for me, because, while it would have made a good point, I’m fairly certain that my wife would have tossed me out of my own house, or hit me with a frying pan.

But, rather, more likely, the explanation is just that real life is not as witty and clever as books and movies. Funny in a written story is an edited, sharpened sort of funny. It’s ten times harder to be funny when telling a story for the first time to a group of friends. You’ve got to edit on the fly, emphasize the funny stuff, and breeze through the boring expository details. It takes lightning quick wit and you’ve got to answer questions while still composing the narrative.

Which is why so many of us tend to tell the same stories over and over again. It gets better each time you tell it, as long as you remember to tell it to new people. And you can focus on the good parts, taking your time as you let it build up to the climax (that’s what she said). And when it’s right there, and you’ve got everyone in your party hanging on the edge, you let ‘em have it, twist ‘em around, and release the tension with the perfect line.

“And that’s when the cop told me he was, in fact, a stripper, and I was sitting on his pet elephant, Snickerdoodle.”

Or perhaps, “Super-Collider? I hardly know ‘er!”

That’s comedy, folks.

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A Lovely Trip To The Zoo (With Animal Parts)

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

My wife recently went on a day-trip to the local metropolitan zoo with her parents, a friend and her two nieces. I was off on a gig somewhere, wishing I was there with them, gallivanting about, frolicking with the animals, but instead I had to work. Alas.

“Do you remember the elephant keys?” She asked me that night. “They had these boxes on top of poles, a long time ago, in front of each different animal exhibit, where you’d stick in a key that you bought at the front gate, and it’d tell you about the animal you were looking at. All of the keys were shaped like elephants back when I was a kid, but now they’re shaped like bears.”

“How interesting.” I said.

“Yeah, well I asked why they weren’t shaped like elephants anymore, and they told me that all of the elephants died a few years ago, quite suddenly, and they haven’t had any elephants since. So they changed the shape of the keys to penguins for a while, but that looked retarded, so they switched them to bears now.”

“That’s depressing. Like an elephant plague, eh? Bears are quite scary, up close, you know.” I said. They really are, too. And horribly smelly.

“Did they really say ‘retarded’?” I asked, curious. “Did they tell you it looked ‘retarded’, using that word?”

“I can’t remember. I think she might have said that.” Hmmm. My how the zoo has changed since I was there a decade ago. Throwing around politically incorrect terms like ‘retarded’ now. What’s next? Telling us that the giraffes won’t be available for viewing because they’re being ‘gay’?

While there at the zoo, my wife and the nieces went on the Nature Walk, an attraction that I had never heard of before. It’s in the kid’s section, and there are bunch of booths set up with various animals at them, and two teenagers at each booth who tell you about the animals. There were chinchillas, a giraffe, a penguin, and a few other animals. The teenagers would change booths every once in a while, so they were all knowledgable about the various animals. Strangely enough, at every booth, along with the live animal that they were teaching about, they would have various dead parts of that animal sitting there, too, that you could touch.

“A penguin flipper at the penguin booth, a giraffe skull at the giraffe booth, a chinchilla pelt at the chinchilla booth, and like that, at each booth.” My wife told me.

“That’s sort of morbid isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it was. And, apparently, when the teenagers did rotations, this one teen girl kept getting stuck holding the dead animal parts. The same girl, I saw at several booths, kept getting stuck showing a detached flipper, or a pelt, you know?”

“Maybe she was new. Or unpopular. Or it was coincidence.”

“Well, my Dad noticed this ‘coincidence’ and said something to her. He said ‘What’s with you and the dead parts, huh?’” I love my wife’s Dad. He’s such an unabashed straight-shooter, like myself. Possibly even more blunt. “And she didn’t answer the question. instead she offered up the fact that all of the parts she was holding either came from animals that had died of natural causes at the zoo, or from private donations.”

“Private donation?” I asked, just to make sure I’d heard correctly.

“Yep. Private donations.” she said, very clearly.

Now, this raises a few questions. Namely, what kind of person donates exotic dead animal parts to a zoo? Does it raise a red flag if many donations are made by the same person? And what’s the acceptance policy on those type of things? Additionally, I wonder what kind of glaring violations would they be willing to overlook to get their hands on something they really want, something quite rare, like a dodo skull?

I don’t imagine it’s a widely publicized fact that the zoo is willing to take off of your hands, say, a spare giraffe skull or some ape bones, if you happen to have those things laying around your home. I am heavily considering doing a bit of covert detective work to see under what circumstances they’d accept a donation.

“I’d like to get rid of these 600 penguin feet… without being asked a lot of questions.”

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Yogurt, Writing, and Beginnings

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

I stand on the rain-slick precipice of darkness, knowing I should be writing my first book, knowing it deep within the meaty core of my yearning heart like a… like a, ummm…

A thingy.

“Jesus Badger-Copulating Christ, this yogurt is disgusting.” I exclaimed. “It tastes exactly like sour cream.”

“IS IT sour cream?” My wife ventured, apparently not putting it past me that I might accidentally consume a small container of sour cream in lieu of yogurt.

(Alright, so it happened once. Ages ago. But it wasn’t yogurt that I thought was sour cream, it was whipped horseradish-cream for putting on prime rib that I thought was regular sweet whipped cream. I proceeded to make the most awful ambrosia salad ever.)

“No, it clearly says yogurt on it. It’s authentic nonfat organic greek yogurt, vanilla flavored. And it tastes like authentic nonfat organic greek s**t, s**t flavored. I mean it, it tastes and has the exact texture of sour cream. There’s nothing about this that reminds me of yogurt, except that it’s clearly labeled yogurt.”

“Well throw it out then,” she said helpfully, a suggestion at which I balked and then scoffed.

Throwing out perfectly edible food is, to me, unthinkable. Surely she jests. Why, yogurt that tastes like sour cream can just be put back into the refrigerator and used on a baked potato someday soon. I’ll just think of the raspberries I’ve added to it as a bit of exotic flare.

These are the types things that interrupt my productive writing time, and yet I allow them to happen. I allow my valuable work time to be consumed by small-talk or daily tasks or other people’s excellent blogs. It’s always been difficult for me to start anything because I’m afraid that I’m beginning it wrong. Crippling self-doubt, etc.

Perhaps my most favorite writers out there are people who I can’t actually imagine writing, at least, not in any real sense. Did Ernest Hemingway have a special boxing glove that could grip a pen so he could write between rounds? Does Anthony Bourdain write while hunched over in a meat locker, pounding away at a typewriter while downing booze and smoking a cigarette that’s subtly flavoring tomorrow’s filet mignons? Did Edna St. Vincent Millay compose poetry in her head while it lay upon the breasts of her lover? Yes, I imagine.

But Chris Hoke? Well, he writes at night while he sits in a lovely little cottage, experiencing slight ankle pain he acquired when getting out of the shower the wrong way that morning, pausing every once in a while to go to the fridge and see if anything has materialized out of thin air since he’s been there last, some 10 minutes ago. He wonders if the bottled water sitting on his desk from 3 days ago is too old to finish off (does water go bad?), and wastes time being pithy on the A.V. Club comment boards. He admires other blogs, social networks, thinks about his personal character arc, and screws around a bit on his bass guitar until his wife, currently trying to sleep, tells him to knock it the hell off.

The answer to my own un-asked question: It must be that there is no wrong way to begin, except perhaps to never begin. For even if the end product is the most horrible thing ever created, there is still hope. It can always be rewritten, polished, backspaced out of existence, hacked up, re-rewritten, and, if that fails to produce something decent, it can be finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters, then begun entirely anew.

And, besides, nothing I write can ever possibly be as bad as that yogurt tasted.

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